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Working with Album Sets

Publisher supports a hierarchy of albums via Album Sets. These are collections of albums or other album sets and are are created and edited in a similar manner to Albums, albeit with fewer options available.

Create album sets by right-clicking the publish service, and selecting 'Create Album Set'. Choose which album set, if any, that this album set should reside under.

The fields of Description and Content Block are used in Auto Index templates. Auto Index templates are created in the same manner as gallery templates: export an Auto Index from the Lightroom Web Module, and upload the set of files to /publisher/templates_autoindex/ on your server. For example:

The templates will then be listed in the Auto Index Template field when creating a new Album Set.

You may choose to not use Auto Index templates, by selecting “No Index”. Users will be able to view your galleries by navigating directly to links, but will be presented a blank page if they visit a link to an index page. For example, with the following albums and sets:

Users who click on the “Galleries” link in Pages will be presented with links to gallery1, gallery2, and album-set-1. album-set-1 will bring up a white page. Users can visit gallery3 and gallery4 by accessing links directly to those pages.

Album sets can be rearranged, by dragging-and-dropping an Album Set onto another album set. Similarly, albums can be dragged from one Album Set to another. The full URLs to each set or album will be updated on the server. They can be deleted, in which case all albums and photos within the album set will also be removed.

To edit an Album Set, right-click the Album Set from within the Lightroom Publisher panel and click “Edit Album Set…”. Unlike with albums, double-clicking an album set will not bring up the edit dialogue.

Selecting a Cover Image

The publisher is not capable of uploading thumbnails from Album Sets, a limitation of Lightroom. Therefore, when first viewing an album set in a gallery index, you will see a space invader holding image. As of Publisher 1.1.9, thumbnails found in the child albums sets and albums of an album set will be available for selection of the cover image.

The depth of the child album sets and albums that are scanned depends on the number of thumbnails found. Should the total found up to a level of depth exceed 1,000 images, then no further scanning will be carried out. As an example, if we have a structure as follows:

The thumbnails for Travel through to Travel/Europe/UK will be returned, totalling 1,050 thumbnails. Firenze (three levels down) will not be scanned as the limit had already been reached at two levels deep.

Thumbnails can also be added to an Album Set manually via FTP. Within each set, you will find a /thumbnails/ folder. Upload one or more representative thumbnail images into the /thumbnails/ folder for each album set. Images in these directories will be added to the list of selectable images in the Album Set dialogue. If configured to Random, then the cover image will be chosen randomly from the images found in the Album Set's thumbnail directory.

If your server denies FTP upload based on user permissions, then you may need to access the /thumbnails folders via the hosting control panel's File Manager, or use the control panel's File Manager to reassign write permissions. You can usually assign 777 permissions to the folder and will thereafter be able to upload thumbnail images freely. If this does not work, however, you may need to reassign ownership of the folder to your FTP user, rather than to 'apache' or 'nobody', which are often the defaults for folders.